We need more scary infinite variants of manmade environments like the Infinite IKEA or the Backrooms.
May I suggest, The Lot:
I’m sorry to disappoint you but this is a real parking lot. I didn’t edit it.
Check out the lot-to-building ratio in any large American sports stadium
Some lots are so big they have bus services specifially inside it. The lots are broken into sections and buses go around to their sections at a set amount of times before the start of something and drive people to the main building.
The societies of lost people inside The Lot would probably operate something like that to locate and pick up new arrivals and bring them over to one of the major settlements.
In the Infinite Ikea or Backrooms you can convince yourself there’s gonna be a door round the next corner or behind that wall.
But despite it being completely open, there is no hope of escape from The Lot. Whereever you look it’s just more cars from horizon to horizon.
Sheesh, man, that’s
a lot
Any artists interested in illustrating some The Lot concept art? Things like
A new arrival realizing a they’re lost
Scavengers systematically going through cars for supplies
A small farming community that dug up the asphalt to plant crops
A veteran traveler coming across two sun-bleached skeletons wearing old-timey clothes next to some old cars, implying they’ve been there for more than a century
How Eldritch do we want this location to be?
More ideas:
Agriculture is impossible; all the food available is truck-stop fare, scavenged from cars. A group of people had the idea to dig up the asphalt to find dirt to grow crops, but the top layer is just laid down on top of a layer of an older kind of hardtop. At one point a group of people excavate a pit several meters deep, uncovering progressive layers of asphalt, concrete, tile, brick, cobblestone, etc. but they never reach dirt.
Since all food is scavenged from cars, groups have to stay on the move. Although, if you want, you could have unobserved cars reset according to some occult criteria, enabling cyclical migratory patterns. Or, if you want, you could have them have to keep moving outwards and hope they don’t cross a patch that’s already been cleared by someone else.
Any foods that actually contain any appreciable amount of fiber become the most treasured kind of food, as everyone gets constipated from eating only the most refined and processed of foods for every meal.
Part of the uncanny feeling of the place is that it is perfectly flat. It’s not immediately obvious because the only things you can climb to get a better view are lampposts, but there’s no curvature to the earth in this place. A cult forms around disassembling cars to build a tower to try and see to the edge. It’s unclear what’s going on with the sun, given there’s still a day/night cycle.
There are plenty of cars to shelter in, but the geomorphology of this place would lead to incredible windstorms at dusk and dawn, with a very still, hot midday, and a bitterly cold night.
As tempting as it might be to populate the space with some kind of intelligent threat (I’ve seen predatory planes and shadow monsters in the notes) I feel like the concept is better served by having the environment itself be the threat.
Maybe there’s never enough drinkable water; it’s mostly soda in the cars; most of the foods available are either very salty or full of sugar. After enough time in The Lot, everyone inevitably ends up pre-diabetic and chronically dehydrated.
Maybe we kick up the weather: black asphalt can get fucking hot at midday; hot enough to fry an egg if the sun is bright enough. Besides sitting in the cars (which may or may not be feasible depending on whether or not they can provide air conditioning), shade is in very short supply, and the abundant reflective surfaces of the cars means you’re gonna get sunburned, bad, if you don’t figure out what to do about noontime.
Conversely, blacktop radiates heat extremely quickly once the sun goes down, and with no plants or rivers to provide humidity the temperatures at night could easily get below freezing.
Flat topology also encourages cyclonic winds; regular, fully fledged tornadoes, flinging cars about and ripping people off their feet could be an actual serious concern.
Write it up like one of those 18th century Adventure Journals. “Day 127: the Swede has scurvy; Johnson’s foot continues to degrade; I would sell my soul for a bran muffin. Thought I saw a bird but it was a hallucination. Tornado at dusk again; we lost the Turk to a falling sedan. I miss waffles.”
Every now and then the inhabitants stumble across a muddy pickup truck, and it’s like finding the Holy Grail because they’re able to chip off the sun-dried dirt for agriculture. It’s slow, a few cups per truck which themselves are few and far between, but given enough time they scrounge enough for a shoebox sized garden of peas and bean sprouts. One guy found half of a dessicated hamburger in a bag of garbage on the floor of a car, and the tomato still had some seeds in it. No clue if they’re still viable, but once they save up a player’s worth of dirt they can try them out. The truck dirt is sterile from being baked for so long, but it’s nothing a little “night soil” can’t fix.
